


just one regret to live through

by secretsarenotforfree



Category: One Tree Hill
Genre: Europe, F/M, Modern TMFU Vibes, Nathan Scott In A Suit, Soulmate AU, bet that's a tag that no one expected to see in this fandom, sexy spies, spy AU, time jumps
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-11-26
Updated: 2020-11-26
Packaged: 2021-03-09 20:26:50
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 12,532
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27722099
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/secretsarenotforfree/pseuds/secretsarenotforfree
Summary: Haley always thought that being a spy with a soulmate mark, a phenomenon only visible once you and soulmate had been together, would complicate things. That, however, was when she was young and fanciful, dreaming of stories and lives she never thought she would lead and knew nothing about the real world, but she easily clocked it as a silly thought now. When your world was wealth and power and everything one did, dirty or slick, was to keep it, soulmate marks mattered little.
Relationships: (future), Clay Evans/Quinn James, Haley James Scott/Nathan Scott, Jake Jagielski/Peyton Sawyer, Julian Baker/Brooke Davis
Kudos: 2





	1. all the bars in all the world

**Author's Note:**

> so this one time i watched the man from uncle for the 23 time and i was deep into naley thoughts and a whole scene sprung up in my damn brain, and now we're here. it's been sitting in my docs for literal months now, i'm not exaggerating it. as far as where it stands right now, i have a few more scenes planned out ?? but idk what their situation is in my head. anyways.
> 
> here's it's pinboard: https://pin.it/K23HewE
> 
> here's it's playlist: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/7eOJjdSOduHxK66NNiUpQM?si=4XInDiwvQ7O5krVNFLqxAw
> 
> title from 'nearly witches (ever since we met)' by panic! at the disco

It is another night, in another city, and the metal of her gun has long since matched the temperature of her thigh under midnight fabric from a luxury designer. The stagnant nature of tonight’s objective had Haley James, for once, rather bored.

Bored, however, may not be the right word for it, because while for all appearances, she was a lady who never needed to employ the zinging synapses in her unexpectedly brilliant brain, true relaxation did not touch a single one of her muscles. Not the tops of her bare shoulder blades, not the stream of her elegant neck, and not in the hand that so delicately lifted a martini to blood red lips. The dusky, so crimson it’s nearly purple, shade, complimented the graceful updo and classic features of the woman who wore it and simultaneously dissuaded inklings of the truth from those who wouldn’t even know what they were looking for. It was impossible to tell that the twin jeweled pins stuck in the silky looking bun were sharp enough to draw blood at the slightest scrape of skin, or that a 9mm and its matching silencer was held tight to her thighs under the lush navy skirt. 

As always distraction and deception was always the goal, Haley’s outfit is engineered to keep one’s attention on the thick ribbon that lined the sweetheart neckline and ties in a drooping, inviting bow on her bare back - anything, to make her seem like less than she is. A weapon, draped in designer fabric and sweeping eyeliner, living the cover of divorcee seeking company at the open bar, and an agent on one of her least favorite kinds of assignment - reconnaissance. 

She hadn’t been to Switzerland before, so that was a plus at the very least. 

The snow glittered outside of the statement windows of the luxury lodge, the mountains a presence that Haley somehow felt comforted by as they loomed near picture perfect through glass that stretched from the floor, just beneath the sumptuous suites, all the way to the ground floor lounge, where she currently has set up shop. 

The bartender tops her off, the espresso martini not the best she’s ever had but not the worst, and it's easy to keep the bite of it from showing on her face when she takes another sip. Haley adjusts for a moment on the seat, crushed velvet on silk, and strokes a piece of hair behind her ear to disguise the gentle prod of her earpiece. 

She knows exactly who’s on the on the other end, but for all his dumb quips at the most inoppurtune times, Clay has found it’s best to leave her alone with her thoughts when there isn’t anything more actionable on the agenda. The two of them have worked together for long enough that one note of his voice was enough to call to her mind’s eye rakish dirty blonde hair and thick black frames she only saw him without when the need to pinch the bridge of his nose and sigh exasperatingly overrode the one to see. 

Haley’s not fond of him (she’s not, she swears), but even their superiors could tell that they worked well in the field together, so she depends on the brick of a man more often than not. If truly pressed upon, she might even admit there were worse people to watch her back than him. (Quinn, the oldest recruit in their loosely designated group of assigned usual subjects, comes easily to mind on the opposite side of that. Or Julian, a near perfect partner, who would be just shy of great, if he could lower his victim empathy so that it would cancel out hers instead of amplifying it.)

The mark of tonight, the head of the board of directors of a very prestigious diamond company, is sprawled loose legged and comfortable like a man who had money long enough to be steeped in its power. He would not be as relaxed, Haley muses, if he knew that one of the members on that board was the prime target for an extortion scheme and it was her job to find out who. 

It was only the first evening of the three day retreat that had men, and their women dripping in their wares, all centered here.

Don’t get Haley wrong, she loves a good glittering piece, had lifted too many to count in her time, but at some point her eyes glazed over. Being able to clock the four c’s from a distance for years had dulled that particular interest for her.

If you had asked the her of ten years ago if she could’ve seen this for herself, with several international bank accounts and safe houses, the latter paid for by her organization, more money on her hands than she’d ever thought to spend and more blood on her hands that she could ever wash off, Haley would’ve laughed bare in your face.

Back then, when she still bleached the sable dark locks now held together with near daggers, when Haley was young and poor and hungry. Hungry for more, for better, and eager to prove herself. Desperate even. Her mother was a showgirl, powerful legs that had kicked for as many nights as she’d been able before turning evening director, her father a warm smile that lived only in her memories due to the recompense of an ill made bet when she’d been but young. She would never forget hearing her mother's scream of horror when the matching script of the soulmate mark she shared with Haley’s dad greyed out on her ankle, brittle and ghost-like.

(Hand wrapped in Lydia James at the funeral, Haley remembers hoping that when her own appeared, her soulmate would be safe.)

These more romantic dreams, of course, faded in the deep grief that followed.

Haley, for her bet, had always excelled at the details, at being quiet and observant and to not make trouble, even as the urge to do more bubbled up in her year after year. She yearned for fun, desperate to distract from meager meals and an aching silence in the odd hours they were home, and was so often the only child in a world So Very Adult. With her mother's eye becoming laxer in her loss, Haley could tell the difference between cocaine and sugar, and loaded die or true before she’d turned thirteen, and she liked this knowledge. Liked that she could take charge of something in a world where she had so little and felt so lost, so she taught herself things. Realized that she could make her fingers exceedingly light, turn them from the piano and guitar she’d taught herself how to play to learning how to fool people with a wraith-like touch they would not remember when they later discovered their valuables were gone.

And the card tricks.

Ah, the thing that had saved her, had scored her her first position at a lower table to artfully shuffle peoples fates. Swing cut, swivel cut, spring flourishes, Haley liked to put on a show. The young girl with the pretty face and the gathering crowd of admirers put rocket fuel on her status. Casino’s were like castles, the higher you go on the tables the more revered your status was, and she made it her goal in life to do just that. By twenty two, she’d been at the highest echelon the casino she worked at could go, dealing at games where she learned to count more than eight zeros after a bet was cashed and not to ask questions about where each of those zeroes came from.

All that success, and still, she kept, if foolishly, pushing for more. There was no way in hell that a card dealer would have come into the kind of things she sold at pawn shops honestly, but she’d gotten away with it for years, spreading out. Never the same shops twice, occasionally using the connections she was making as her fences, attempting to keep a tight lid on the pleasure Haley got from her growing number of louboutins and garments of a quality she could have never have imagined in her youth. 

Her whole problem, back then, was thinking she was smarter. Smarter than him, smarter than her, smarter than anyone who presented a threat to her rather lucrative, rather illegal, one person theft ring.

And then Haley had got caught. 

And she thought it was over.

Which it was - in the case of stealing, for herself.

The job, in the end, happened to her.

They got her recruited, they got her trained, Haley learned to take great, blooming purple bruises like she’d once taken paper cuts and to deal back that punishment with a purpose, and though the road had been bumpy, and rough, and slick with wrongs she would never have excuses for, she’d survived long enough to make it here. Working for an organization that would get her out of near any jail on earth, but would barely shed a tear if she died. 

(Ah, barely politically sanctioned espionage. Never change.)

Clay would, probably. One time, he forgot they were on comms and had a very emotional moment about a turtle ninja cartoon. That was about the time that Haley lost her all respect for him and doubled down on the theory that he was doomed to forever not quite make it to adulthood for the rest of time.

(He earns it back every time he hacks into a security system in half of a breath and saves her ass, makes a joke witty enough that the amusement bubbling in her chest wants to break character, or somehow, somehow, manages to get exactly what Haley needs exactly when she needs it.)

It’s been barely a week since her last mission, and she still feels it in every ache of her body. Though Haley did her damnedest to never get hurt lastingly as far as marks went, painstaking in her stitches, cleaned with bourbon and rigid fingers in a coat rack while she tried not to scream, and attentive with her lotioning, some things weren’t as visual and lasted much longer. There was the concussion from Texas that liked to cause her ears to ring mightily if she ever got clocked too hard in the head, the thick scar tissue on the bottom of her left foot from a rather remarkable recovery from a burn injury, all things considered. Haley was still working herself up to the bigger meals she used to inhale without any problem in the early years of her new ‘job’ after a rough six days a couple months ago, and there was nerve damage in three of the fingers of her non-dominant hand. Even now a slightly yellowish bruise continued its slow path to fade on the curve of her hip, the pain so commonplace to her now that ignoring it came as easily as breathing to the brunette woman.

Sometimes, she missed the normality of what she’d left behind. It was the little things. The touch of her mama’s hand against her forehead when Haley was sick, most sorely missed on those nights when a slight infection had burned a fever through her and she’d felt more alone than ever. The comforting familiarity of glaring yellow and red neon that told Haley that Vegas was home, the softly pressing weight of poker chips in her palm and the way that cards grew warm in her hands from constant dealing. The tattoo she’d gotten for her twenty first birthday with a best friend she’d long had to leave behind for her own safety, the statement  _ 23  _ lasered off to lessen her chances of identification on a job.

Sometimes, she did.

But most times, Haley tried to focus on the perks of the job, of ridding the world of roach like people and doing a little something to even the scales, even if she dwelled more on the darker side of the moon than not in order to make it happen.

(She would deny that the life, at times, gnawed lonely at her with blunt teeth.)

The man’s conversation is winding down, and Haley is grateful for the soon to be change in scenery. The bar napkin she has, shielded from the two lone cameras in the cavernous lounge, honestly a terrible foresight by the building’s security, has the names of the board members slipped in between nonsensical doodles. Fredriech Muller has had a grand time detailing almost half of his board in a bragging tone to a colleague not lucky enough to attend, but his voice is growing dry. Haley knows, unlike her cover, the oblivious ex-Mrs. Leotti, that he will have a woman waiting in his room after he signals to the front desk on his way up. 

She resists curling her lip when the thick scent of his cologne wafts past her at the wake over his confident strides, and watches her mark head for the ornate gold plated elevators through thick lashes.

Even though her legs and ass have been numb for the better part of an hour, she cannot leave yet - one more drink, and it’ll put Haley’s departure long enough after Mr. Muller’s that suspicion would never occur to anyone who’d had been idly, or not so, watching.

“ _ Man, I thought he would never leave.”  _ Clay’s voice slides into life in her ear, as natural as if he were sitting right beside her and not at the Bed & Breakfast twenty miles and about the same amount of social rungs lower away. He was no stranger to missions with a more hands on need, ordering bourbons and employing that rate gift of being s person people unwittingly spilled their secrets too, but he preferred to be behind a computer rather than behind a gun. She forgave his preferences if only for the sheer fact that when the occasion called for it, the amount of damage he incurred on their unfortunate enemy more than made up for it.

“Says the man who’s relaxing behind a laptop, probably halfway through a swiss cheese sandwich from that owner you cannot, for some reason, stop talking about.” The words are light and ripple through the tenuous surface of her drink, disappearing in Haley’s mouthful.

“ _ Adelaide is a Swiss national treasure, and I will not hear her slandered. _ ” 

“Marry her, then.” Haley’s close to the bottom of her glass. She swirls it gently, staring at it, and mindlessly appreciates the little things. Like her favorite throwing knives, sewn to the bottom of her three part make up kit. And that the metal of her gun had long warmed to the temperature of her bare thigh.

“ _ Just because you never like to find company when we’re working, doesn’t mean I don’t. _ ” Thanks to a few rather scarring situations where the wall they shared wasn’t thick enough, Haley uncomfortably knows it to be true. Clay forgot to turn his mic off more often than her nausea was a fan of, and that boyish grin worked all around the globe.

Just because she wasn’t as inclined to go running around with international men in between, oh, stakeouts and gun fights and running like  _ hell  _ didn’t make her less of an agent, Haley had always felt rather indignantly. There was no need to model one's career of a famous spy who wasn’t even real. Shaken not stirred her ass. (Even though Daniel Craig would, she deigns, be an exception to the usual international dalliance rules.)

Besides, well.

After him, none of the others felt even close.

Clay takes her silence for the slight brush off it is, and sighs in an aggrieved tone. “ _ Just don’t forget to type up your observations tonight. I need a copy and so do they. _ ” Haley hums and finally downs the rest of her drink, fishing a couple of crisp francs out of her wallet. She’s overtipping, but she doesn’t very much care. 

“ _ I’ll meet you tomorrow at oh eight hundred at the cafe. Maybe try not to be incredibly early? Considering you know that I am always late?”  _ Now this, is a lie. Clay is often early, just like her, a constant, unspoken battle to show up the other if they’re not rooming together or close by. They both front as if being on time is not a long standing challenge between them both. “ _ You know to reach me if you need me. _ ” 

He disconnects, a tiny click that Haley’s learned to listen for after a few horrifying instances of him overhearing her annoyed, often colorful mutterings about him right after they’ve finished their need of comms for the time, and inwardly she lets down a fraction of her guard. Room service, after all, is calling her name. Something pricks at the nape of her neck, a nerve riding  _ awareness  _ that has sparked on and off, leaving the remainder of her drink to have been downed in a frigid sort of scan. Haley did not feel at risk, not the low spike of danger that her senses had been so painfully toned to over the last seven odd years, but she felt  _ aware. _

The slight draw of the twined gold bracelet that hung a bit loose on her wrist was a comfort, the slight press of a hidden button a signal that she did, in fact, need Clay once more, but Haley held off on it. Doesn’t want to disturb him for something that, if the occasion called for it, she could take on herself.

She feels like maybe she’s felt something like this before, but it was like trying to grasp smoke in her hands, whispering, slippery through her grasp, almost as if trying to recall an old dream. Her soulmate mark simmers a little, an uncomfortable sensation that has accosted her off and on over the years since those thirty odd hours so long ago. The  _ always  _ is blue lightning, rainbow reflecting off the scratchy handwriting if it had been anywhere close to the light instead of hidden beneath cinched fabric, lengthwise, on the swooped line of her spine. Haley always thought that being a spy with a soulmate mark, a phenomenon only visible once you and soulmate had been together, would complicate things. That, however, was when she was young and fanciful, dreaming of stories and lives she never thought she would lead and knew nothing about the real world, but she easily clocked it as a silly thought now. When your world was wealth and power and everything one did, dirty or slick, was to keep it, soulmate marks mattered little.

Plus, some people never met their soulmate. Take Clay, perhaps a thousand women and a divorce deep, and not a single word. 

(Though, all things considered, counting the divorce wasn’t exactly fair - Haley had stood up at their wedding, after all, and had saddened when the unforeseen stroke caused a breakdown in his wife so badly he had to commit her after a murder attempt he absolutely would not have survived without his training.)

(Alright, so maybe Clay and Haley were more true friends, despite the job and the work to be done, then she would like to admit. They both knew that too much loyalty to anyone outside the organization was dangerous in itself, no matter how honestly platonic.)

The sensation follows her, flirting against the swish of her full skirts against Haley’s smooth calves, brushing the bottom of her spiked heels as she strides into an elevator, pointedly keeping her gaze trained on her floor when a few others join her. 

Even if Haley does not yet know what this is, she knows that it would be losing if she looked first at the man whose presence she felt more than the two other businessmen entered the car and engage in a hushed conversation about which displays they’d seen that day and which were more suitable for their wives or mistresses. When her gaze dips down to lead to a brush at her skirts, an imagined stain invented to double check the placement of her 9mm under them, she catches a slight peripheral glance of leathered chukka boots and the sharp cut of a forest green pant leg.

They tick through two floors after they’re left alone once more, and then - 

“So what is this game we’re playing?”

Ah, victory. The tension is broken, and Haley swings her covers wide, bright from too many martini’s eyes over to her companion. This gaze instantly shudders back to her own because she  _ knew _ this man.

And oh, is he a sight to see.

Thick, inviting black hair, as dashing as the sharp line of a jaw conspicuously dusted with hair. The line of that almost beard is so neat it nearly makes her think that it is sheer force of will that keeps it so, and not the foamy edge of a razor. One strand of grey flirts near the part of his temple, the slight curl of his strands just as distracting as the masculine hollow of his throat beneath his adams apple, the line of ivory skin that narrows into a slightly unbuttoned black shirt. The cut of the sumptuous dark emerald three piece must be tailored to shoulders like those, elegantly built so that it was the breadth of them that announced him first, rather than lightning blue eyes and the sinful promise of the one mole that flirted beneath them. 

He is rather conspicuously missing both a tie, and even a  _ thin  _ veneer of casualness with that gaze fastened right on her features, partnered with the near imperceptible lift of the corner of that mouth, and it is that movement that plunges Haley through space in time, to when she was twenty two and riding high and the one night from  _ before  _ that would always stand out lightyears from the rest.

Even the shock can’t fight through the years of training on Haley’s face, but she is sure that it registers in her eyes. 

Because -

Well…because.

“ _ You. _ ” She breathes, low and accusatory with a narrowed stare that neither of them break.

“Me.” He accuses somehow right back, something dark flashing deep in those eyes even under the clear control. 


	2. the past and the now

They regard each other, neither breaking, even when the elevator doors slide smoothly open on Haley’s floor. Even the fact that in her sky high heels she must tilt her chin up to more properly meet him hits her with another dose of memory and Haley wonders with a bit of a cold fury how she hadn’t fully recognized and then dissected him before. Alas, her muscle memory had always been stronger than her mental one. Her body has an immediate, joyous reaction to the nearness of this drug she had only taken once but remained seeped into her veins, betraying Haley deeply. 

“And might I ask, what is a flirty little card shark from Las Vegas doing in a Switzerland chateau?”

Haley’s grip tightens on her clutch, though it would fall to the marble at their feet if she had to go for the piece on her thigh. If he blew her cover, there would be things she would have to do, and they all involved ruining what was obviously a body that had only gotten more trimmed and cut than when she last seen it. She tilts her head to the side and cools her gaze, assessing and thorough from head to toe. Haley will be damned if he isn’t just as fine, if not more so, on the second time through. “Only if a fledgling mechanic from the East Coast is willing to answer the same question.”

Nathan Scott, a man that Haley hadn’t set eyes on since the twenty four hours in which she’d fallen in love with him, unfurls from his relaxed position against the opposite corner of the elevator like a panther and presses a number only one flight above Haley’s own. Since he was the first to break, she loses no time averting her own gaze to the wall of glowing letters, the  _ 12  _ mocking her in butter yellow. Asking her why she wasn’t immediately neutralizing this threat to her composure, her  _ mission _ , when what was supposed to be a routine covert op that was eighty percent knowledge gathering only twenty percent murder had landed her in the lap of the one man she might have given up the life for, before she’d even truly had it.

Instead of answering her, he stands more fully at the low ding that is to Haley almost as a gunshot that signifies the twelfth floor. “Room 1223. If I don’t have company by the end of my first glass of whiskey, I might have to go look for it instead.” As quickly as Nathan had thrown a car rather than a wrench into her plans for the evening, the vehicle spinning and burning from its collision with a wall in her brain as he strides through the doorway and down the hall without a care in the world, Haley fights a lot of things.

She fights the warnings that scroll digitized and printed easy almost as if on the back of her eyelids, the results of rules Haley had pored over until she could write them near by heart. She fights the guilt of knowing that if she went through with this, she might threaten her near perfect record, one of the only things she had to cling to in a life as changing as this, as well as Clay’s position in this. Clay, who was probably sunk deep in Adelaide by now, and quite, Haley was sure, blissfully unaware. The demon that refuses to surrender to Haley’s mental warring, however, is a series of flashes that wrap gold burning fingers around the heart beating in her chest, despite the opinion her victims probably shared of her not having one.

A purple flower, tucked behind her ear. Laughing, hushed like, in the honeymoon suite of the hotel adjacent to the casino she called her home for years before she lost the having of one to the job and all it came with. The only time Haley had blown on a pair of die and meant it, tangled in each other in the back of a limousine with her hair askew and hot, talented hands all over her, and a blurry exchange of rings in front of an Elvis sans a wig and his mother as a witness that she only fully remembered years later. And then the last, waking up after perhaps the greatest twenty some hours of her life at the time, and knowing that the game she was about to deal for would make or break her career, and had more high players than any she’d dealt for before. The quiet, melancholy shame of collecting her things at a time so dead of night it wouldn't have had to try to masquerade as morning, and pressing a kiss to a stubble cheek. There is a run of Haley’s hand over hair cut near military short, and a frenzied hurriedness in leaving the room as if going any slower would burn more than the regret of leaving it all behind without even a last name, actions that belonged to her even more, a whole other person away.

Not a day later, she was caught red handed by people miles above her paygrade, and Haley’s life changed.

She never checked on the man she’d left behind.

She never let herself wonder if the ceremony has been anything more than an infatuated dream.

But now, a little more than seven years later, Haley James takes in a deep breath between cherry wine lips and reminds herself that she has sniped murderous generals with less uncertainty in her gut than this. She tells herself that if she can fit into crawl spaces to record treacherous conversations, take down a hit squad when she was down half of her bullets, and seduce and fleece a mark in the space of a well used half hour, she can certainly do this. 

So she uses the tiny EMP in her purse to short out the lone camera, and reloads her gun. Clicks off the safety, prays to whatever god is listening to keep its trigger steady, fastens it once more...and Haley James follows the deceptively easy gait of her husband and tries to get her thoughts not to focus more on the way the shadow of his gaze still burned over inch of her skin and, rather, on the black metaled piece she had seen pressed against the back of that too tailored suit when his hands had tightened in his slack pockets.

* * *

_ She bites her lip, saucy and shy in the muted, far away lighting of the currently empty private party suite. The room has only been recently cleaned, the maids and house people still heard carting their equipment down steps and into elevators, but Haley had memorized their patterns and routines long ago.  _

_ It’s on her promise and his reckless confidence that has his focus strikingly focused on the line of her throat, brushing a hand along it as if he were appreciating a rare marble statue. Lucky him, when he makes contact her skin is veined with blood and not stone, velvet inviting underneath his fingers, and then lips. She gasps, hand fisting in the back of his shirt near the small of his back, dragging upward to get ahold of his bare skin, and Nathan growls against her throat. _

_ She is everything sweet and right in this world and if he doesn’t get a better taste soon, he may as well die. They are surrounded by things forbidden to the monetary likes of them, fine crystal and lush carpet and a liquor cabinet kept stocked with more than either of them made in a year, but Nathan is nothing but overwhelmingly grateful for the creature of pleasure fate had seen fit to melt into his hands.  _

_ No girl had ever felt like hair, heavy hair and giggles his lips trail up her neck to swallow like butterflies into his own mouth. Legs he’d only recently been given permission to touch wrap round him now, taking advantage of the position she had atop the bar, and he pulls her waist even tighter to him in answer. He could just count the number of hours he’d spent with her with both hands, but he was starting to get the startling notion that he could keep counting and never want to run out when they were with Haley.  _

_ She’s never been so grateful that she took a chance on him then at this moment, when her heart was soaring almost as high as the fire he was stoking so easily in her, and she thinks that of course, that’s why she’s been waiting - for him to be the first. _

_ (For him to be the one she thought about for the rest of her life when she thought of life changing moments, yes. Haley thinks if she was to think back, and she remembered everything she was feeling right now, then yes. It would be worth it.) _

_ (Nathan, was worth it.) _

_ “Nathan. Nate.” She pants his name, her fingers curling deeper into the rounded cut of his upper biceps. He kisses one more time under her ear, near tickling her, and Haley doesn’t know what to do with the feeling that bubbles up in her, seeing his much he looked like he’d been making out in a dark corner with her. HER, of all people.  _

_ (Haley didn’t know what brought him to her, but damn was she grateful.) _

_ “I wanna show you somewhere.” She insists, and grabs his hand. “Trust me.” _

* * *

This life had not just happened to him.

He, rather, had happened to it.

It had been the first thing in a rather cushy life that had not fallen into his lap, and it was the thing he’d fought the second hardest for in all the time that had passed since he’d taken his first lungful of air.

He had been headed down a bad road. 

There, he could admit it, albeit after years of denial and brush offs to those who only knew Successful Agent Nathan Scott and not Resident Fuck-Up Nathan Scott. If one were to chart how he had gotten here, little black marks indicating his pitfalls and where he had struggled, unsuccessfully, to pull himself up, the events would be easy to distinguish. There was the dysfunctional marriage, the abusive father who’d been dead set against letting Nathan’s mother leave despite being in clear, furious love over a woman only with eyes for his brother. Then the car accident who had whisked Dan, not ungratefully, from them all. Nevermind that he had never, ever seen his dealership owning father have trouble controlling a car in his life, a fact that not one member of his family spoke a word of after he was lowered into the ground. There was the chain of boarding schools, each one he got kicked out of for a worse reason than the last, an endless source of maternal frustration from his mother and a general throwing up of the hands of the rest of his family.

The rest, except for his Uncle Keith.

His Uncle Keith, who’d bailed him out when he’d pulled his back playing street ball and the clusterfuck that his dream became sent him into bars and willingly thrown into their fights. His Uncle Keith, who remained the only member of the family to have never been cussed out by Nathan, who was always there for Nate whether he was there or not. Who gave him a job when he was at his lowest, who taught him everything his father had only disdainfully mentioned about cars, and who was the dad that Nathan had always wanted.

Who, being ex-military, saw Nathan’s progress plummet and start to spiral again after that weekend in Vegas, made some calls, did some convicing, and got him enrolled in the academy.

Turned out, structure was all he needed, in the end. Structure, and someone to believe in him when he actually started believing in himself after a long, long period of self hatred and doubt. He had fucked around in those first couple of months, doing the bare minimum to continue in training and staring morosely at the  _ forever  _ that predated his joining by a scant few weeks. Unexpectedly, without Nathan really noticing it, something started to grow in those classes. Turned out he shared rather a knack for languages, and the brain that used to be hardwired to basketball plays took just as easily to sparring, strength, agility, and mixed martial arts training. Tack on a couple years as a member of the Army, a prerequisite for the ranks he was trying to join, and Nathan had no choice but to grow. It was those quiet moments that helped clarity mix in his mind, the only other time he’d been able to achieve it when without the help of abandoning, big brown eyes and a waterfall of strawberry blonde, and he clung onto it with both hands.

He built something out of himself, in those years. Physically, mentally, finally using his photographic memory for more than a party trick, finally using hands that always yearned for a higher purpose, finally finding himself within a  _ team _ .

(So sure, it came with a little murder, but so did every job. People butchered their character, values, ethics every day to get ahead in the workplace, or just through the day. In Nathan’s case, he at least tried to add some style to it, and the only blood spilt was completely necessary, and more or less for the greater good. Definitely more. Not a lot of less, but things happened.

People pissed him off. People got in the way. People impeded the mission.

If you had been designated as an innocent, there was only so much guilt Nathan could gather together for you. 

Most of it ended up being pity.)

This team, if he was being honest, was one he would have never seen himself being in. No way in hell could he have ever expected this, trusting a chameleon extraordinaire who dressed as if she was constantly attending Paris Fashion Week (a thing Nathan now horrifyingly knew about), and a tech wiz who’s hands-on approach to computers was as unknowable as her black lipstick and even blacker, blood beating heart, with his life. Easily. The latter of which, he now knew with painful certainty, given to a moment of absolute stupidity on both of their parts when they tried to make in the field chemistry translate to an actual relationship, his soulmate mark glaringly visible and bedamned. Every agent he’d ever met had advised him not to date in the job. He now knew with regretful clarity how right they were, a fact he so often used as an excuse whenever Rachel was back from whatever the hotter the better locale she’d been sent to and tried to convince him to give her a chance.

(It took some time, but he and Peyton's platonicness had been strengthened a lot more, in recent months. Nathan heard she was dating someone from the legal, clean up department, named Jake. 

They never talked about it.)

He doesn’t know how he manages to find a job he would have never dreamed available to him, much less perfect for, and ninety percent of the fellows he ever managed to bump into were women. He also doesn’t know if it's his fault for getting involved in a more northwest based politically approved operation, rather than an international one.

For whatever the reason, Nate owed his life more times than he could count to Brooke, his dependable supplier of his favorite sig sauers and colt pistols, all the ammo he could want and everything necessary for the mission split neatly into a carry on bag and another to be delivered at destination. He admired anyone that had the measurements of near everyone they worked with mesmerized and flawlessly outfitted each agent for the mission, finding new ways to hide a knife there, a vial here. 

(Plus, he knew jack shit about suits but he always felt more gentleman in his spy when she was in charge. It had enough of a measurable effect on his performance that he had the code he needed to reach her if she wasn’t with him on site, which she was more often than not.

Often, Nathan thinks of the uptick of accommodations and locations he started receiving after being paired with her. Then he decides to not look a gift horse in the mouth and dutifully tries to walk in front of whatever mirror he can while on assignment with her so she can huskily admire her own handiwork in his ear with the help of the miniscule camera implanted in most of his buttons.)

Peyton, for once, wasn’t with them in the centuries cold and effortlessly majestic Alpine mountains. She notoriously loathed places that weren’t warm and sunny, or at least neutral, and often managed to find a reason to be their remote contact instead. Nathan never cares, as long as she makes sure they have extraction ready when he, more often than not, does something reckless and lucky and gets their time table moved up. For the most part, it ends up being moved up  _ drastically. _

She’d always had his and Brooke’s back. So he doesn’t begrudge her her loss of slight frostbite, or the secret signals pluming from his mouth rather than hers in a wraithlike cloud to disappear into the lower arms of stately evergreens.

This particular assignment, he hadn’t initially had a room, which had kind of been a bummer.

Brooke, posing as a wealthy heiress who’d managed to finagle an invitation only due to the promise of spending copious amounts of money, spent the first night wining and dining the event coordinator while Nathan made like a waiter, bowtie, crisp towel and all, and took stock of the residents. The whole place had been cleared out for retreat guests, a testament to the amount of funds involved, and getting a hold of the guest list had required little sniping, but a small struggle outside of the hotel manager's office. Thank God for darts filled with a nifty concoction Peyton had put together to wipe him, mostly, from their memories, and make them think their black eyes and aching limbs were from a few ill timed tumbles.

He’d had to sleep that first night in the laundry room, somehow now the lowest on the list of places he’d had to catch some shut eye in the years since he’d started down this road. 

Day two, he gets a room. Re-entering as Jessica Monroe’s (Brooke’s cover) arriving at last minute brother, and all too eager to collapse onto the other available en suite bedroom with a long sigh. 

“Well don’t you look comfortable?” 

Honestly, there is no need for Nathan to crack open an eyelid to visualize the natural smirk and unsympathetic, knowing gaze in his current partner’s eyes, but he was indulgent of their verbal sparrage. She looks just as he knew she would - long wet oak hued hair still a few shades lighter than his, arms crossed in a robe embossed with the lodge’s initials. Brooke had told him once that she’d convinced their superiors that she was more efficient in Brooke-conducive environments. He  _ never  _ wanted to know what she had done to bring them over to her side of the issue. The woman could do frankly terrifying things with the length of any fabric in her hands, no matter the quality.

“You try sleeping in a bin filled with towels that other people rubbed their naked bodies all over.” He grumbled, looking up at her from where his elbows rest against his knees. “Oh, that’s right. You were in the lap of luxury all evening.”

“All evening. Right, unless you could the two and a half exceedingly painful hours pretending that there was more to a man than his taste in place setting.” Brooke pads over and pulls a long silver case from underneath the bed. “Brought your favorites. I’m going to assume that you didn’t need to use a clean up last night because you didn’t try to contact me, but I ensured you had some extra bullets for the piece you’ve had on you just in case.”

“What would I do without you?”

“Hmmm.” Brooke mock thinks, poking the side of his forehead in friendly affection before leaving the room as gracefully as she’d entered it. “Get riddles with bullets and sink into the ocean somewhere, never to be found. But it’s just a guess. I’m sure you’d get yourself in a much more creatively bad situation.”

For whatever reason, those in charge of their ragtag crew, one of so many, encouraged allegiances to each other. To be fair, the five of them hadn’t given them much reason to discourage it - they went to great lengths, especially the three of them, to ensure each of them made it out alive while the mark, or whatever the case may be did not. For whatever reason, Nathan appreciates it. It was nice to be a part of something.

(He remembers how Brooke tracked down the specs of the prized HDM, modified it to his powerful, utilizing design and trigger preferences, and presented it to him for his thirtieth birthday. If one accused him of holding that beautiful weapon later and nearly weeping for its elegance, he would deny it as if you were trying to interrogate him.)

Thankfully, he had time to get in a quick, needed nap before venturing back out into the lodge, this time as playboy and notorious fuck up Harlan Monroe. He spends the daylight hours flirting with nearly any woman he saw with energy only those who truly knew him would know was half hearted at best, but. The cover had to be met. In the evening, he changes into the suit Brooke laid out on his desk, slips the adapted double barrel into the holster integrated into his designer belt, cleverly hidden with the flare of his nevertheless tailored suit, and heads out once more.

While Nathan had ascertained at this point in their investigation which alleged ‘investor’ was hiding under the guise of having a stake in one of the diamond companies represented here to find a target, they hadn’t yet been able to confirm if the rest of the members of the most affluent board weren’t in on it. He had been working his way through their roster, awaiting the evening 'spout bullshit and drink' their intelligence had reported was common for the head of it, when she had walked in.

And goddamn, it had been some years and years but it is Nathan’s  _ job  _ to notice everything and he could never, ever, forget her.

Her hair was dark now - jet brown black levels of striking that he had only been able to guess at from her roots the last time he saw her, the years womanizing her already statement curves and drawing the features of herself to an even more breathtaking relief. Nathan gazes at her, dumbstruck, glass of whiskey forgotten from his place leaning against the gentle balconies separating the guest service and restaurant level from the sprawling, exposed lounge, and near loses his lungs the first time her deliberately distracted gaze swung close enough this way to glimpse that burned cherry red, still desperately inviting mouth. The low cut of her dress exposes winged collar bones and creamy shoulders, and Nathan is speechless. 

He’s disarmed, and she hasn't even touched him.


	3. secrets or just  lies

He’s absolutely thrown off his game when her gaze darts to his target, the brash voice bouncing off the bartender tidying up, the only thing to do when you only had a few patrons, and heralding the scrawl of an ink pen across a bar napkin. Nathan can’t see what's written on it from here, but he is deep in denial about it meaning anything. 

Despite the fact that the soulmate mark branded honey sweet and pained feels icy hot against the corded inside of his right wrist. 

Despite the fact that he very distinctly remembers words being murmured into his bare chest of longing to leave the Silver State with the bittersweet taste of perceived impossibility.

Despite the fact that he can’t think of a single, explainable reason for the greatest twenty four hours of his life to be in the same luxury Swiss lodge as he was, a bit more than seven years later, looking vision like and just as pretty and sharp as a well hewn knife, if you knew how to look. 

(And Nathan knew, how to look.)

In fact, Nathan didn’t feel like he knew much at all right now, but he was damn sure he was going to find out. That was what a spy did, right? Discover, reveal, learn, secrets. 

Nathan saw some secrets that needed revealing right about now.

So he downed his drink, followed her into an elevator, and watched her face as the reality of who he was dawned in those heartbreakingly stunning clear brown eyes. He doesn’t mind ceding the floor to her first, because in clocking her before she had him, he still had the upper hand. A heaviness lay thick in the air between them, the years and something bigger that Nathan can’t quite put his finger on yet, but the first sound of her voice reminds him that that girl, who had owned his heart and soul forever in a mere matter of a strikingly short amount of time all those years ago, was in still there.

Somewhere.

In those moments, waiting for her next move, he would mentally cling to the strength of the silk thin wrought gold around his neck, obligingly left out of reports and finagled into every cover she could by a bemused and curious Brooke, that had once been a matching set of rings, and thinks that if the universe owes him anything, it certainly owes him this.

And when he heard the graceful sound of her heels against the elegant and sprawling dark marbled floor, no match for the woman who followed his league, Nathan for one moment forgot all about the mission, and the blood on his hands that flooded, vast and remarkable, all that time between them, and simply thought that maybe, for he and his wife…

There was hope.

* * *

_ Vegas was not the destination Nathan could have foreseen for the bachelor party, but any excuse to get him out of North Carolina was a good one in his book. _

_ Lucas was his step cousin, the biological son of his Aunt Karen and his Uncle Keith, the child of a man who’d done despicable things under the sickening, suffocating blanket of memory altering drugs and who had never been discovered and punished. For all intents and purposes, he was Uncle Keith’s kid, and though this was definitely a case of liking the uncle more than the cousin, he had reluctantly agreed to be a part of the guys bachelor party.  _

_ He was just grateful he wasn’t dating someone four years younger anymore. At least Lindsay was Lucas’s age. _

_ It’s edging near to midnight and he’s lost more than he’s won at the tables. The ragtag group of men that Nathan doesn’t really know, a shallow nameless sea around his cousin, seem almost separate from him as they play slot machines, laugh uproariously, and leer at the showgirls that so often traipse through the gambling floor. He is content to take another drought of his beer and tell himself that the two day weekend will be only moderately less painful than poking out his own eyeballs, when his gaze is caught. And stuck, riveted and arrested, by a girl who strides through the milling groups of people as if she owns the place. _

_ There could be any number of reasons why Nathan’s attention had been ensnared, even from a removed perspective, which Nathan, possessing two working eyes and a quite natural rush of blood, did not have. _

_ He took in, slowly, the swept up bun of strawberry blonde, the look of sophistication clearly engineered to look older. He gets stuck for a moment on the effortlessly cute little black bow right below blessedly exposed delicate back dimples, on the one around her neck that matched and how the coal dark shade was the same as a very short ruffled skirt. From what Nathan’s learned about Vegas in the five some hours since their flight had touched down, he knows that the spindly heels and bright, sparkling white, vest are not typical dealer wear. Neither, he assumes, were the feminine gloves clothing hands that worked actual magic with a deck of cards. _

_ He’d never seen a card trick in person before, and the sweating glass in Nathan’s palm is easily forgotten in the wake of the flying, embossed paper, and the casual way that the dealer who was making them happen, well, was making them happen. _

_ So he watches. _

_ Observes, with more than a passing fascination, the two suited men holding metal briefcases and a set of chips embossed in a gold he sensed was much higher karat than whatever his cousin had stacked precariously by his elbow. The little party assembles itself in the middle elevator, and the strikingly pretty girl slides the dancing cards together with a snap and smiles, privately and victoriously, to herself.  _

_ Of course, it is only due to his shitty luck that her gaze rises, if by accident, to meet his only in the moment before the casino elevator doors slide closed. _

_ She lingers in his head, those talented hands and even more talented looking legs, for the next hour or so. He loses about a hundred more before they move on to roulette, and as the most sober of the party Nathan skillfully manages to get a table still within views of those elevator doors.  _

_ Just, you know. In case. _

_ This diligence pays off in the midst of the fifth straight tequila toast to Lucas’s new ball and chain when he pauses, mid shot, at the sound of a standard sounding pin. The girl from before, this time without her beefy sidekicks, emerges, looking flushed and satisfied almost as if returning from a particularly satisfying encounter.  _

_ (Though Nathan doubts that is in fact where she has come from, he nevertheless feels an offhand surge of jealousy at the thought.) _

_ Wisps of her long hair have floated down from the now less severe bun and frame her almost heart shaped face, and her deck of cards is tucked carefully under her arm. Her gloves are gone, briefly bringing to his mind the idea of sheaths for such a clear set of skills, and he wonders at the tiny bandaid that now scored her small palm.  _

_ A middling sized kid, the first he’d seen, it felt, since Nathan had touched down in Vegas, barrels into her legs, and she catches him with the ease of someone used to that kind of assault. Crouched knees and a wave of her hand later, a card is coming from behind a set of too big ears, and something in his heart turns frighteningly gooey for a girl he hasn’t even talked to yet. _

_ So he changes that. _

_ “Hey stranger.” Nathan leans one arm against the roulette table, deceptively relaxed and easy in his worn jeans and button down that had seen better days. “Got any luck to spare?” _

_ Ostensibly, there’s a decent amount of activity around them. The noise of the slot machines, the groans or celebrations of people trying their luck, the raucous sloppy laughter coming from the bachelor party he is only now suddenly grateful for, all provide a distracting background, but his tone tells of its direction. She looks up, the child now running away with a heart of some kind clutched in his grasp, and quirks a brow. Nate rattles the hand containing matching red die in her direction, his patented charming grin curving his lips easily and just teasing at a dimple.  _

_ “And what if I don’t?” She’s standing now, brushing at the flares of that short black skirt, and he wishes very much that he could do that for her. Instead, he shrugs his shoulders. _

_ “Humor me. Blow on them anyway.” _

_ A moment ticks by, then two, and then victory is his when she makes her way to him. Nathan angles his body so that he is between her and the rest of the very distracted bachelor party, and hold up the die for her, willing himself in vain to not let the warm rush of air that flows from her lips set the rest of him on fire. He fails, of course, miserably, but still takes a silent victory when she leans interestedly on the worn wood, her eyes watching as he throws them onto the cheap green felt. “All of it on twenty three.” Nathan says out loud, but he’s not watching the die or the rest of the table.  _

_ He’s just looking at her. _

_ And it is in looking at her that he realizes that he won, when she smiles with all the charm and simple beauty of a flower in bloom, and dragging his gaze away is actual hell.  _

_ “Well I’ll be damned.” Nathan accepts his winnings, the small victorious stack of blue plastic chips, but panics briefly when she makes to walk away. His hand goes out without even realizing it and fastens loosely on her delicate wrist, locking his gaze straight at her. “When are you off tonight?” _

_ She hesitates, and he for a moment is struck with the terrifying thought that maybe, there was some rule that would prevent her from saying yes. Or maybe he just hadn’t sold himself well enough yet to gain it. “Twenty minutes.” She finally says softly, and it’s quite a thing to have that grin reach her eyes while she was looking at him. “I’m headed to my last table of the night.” _

_ “I have nothing but time.” His words are simple, but determined, and he lets go of her to wrap his hands around his small, precious stack instead. “Do you mind if I go with you? I have a feeling that you’ll be taking my luck with you.” _

_ The wattage of that grin slides up two ticks and the satisfaction of causing something as good in this world as that bursts through his chest like a firework that tears his insides in two. “Only if you don’t tell the other guests who’s got it. And - I'm Haley." _

_ "Nathan." To say his lips didn't take a slightly devilish turn would be to lie.  _

_ Without another glance at the group of men too drunk to remember when he would have even left their side in the morning, Nathan follows unhesitatingly the petite card dealer whose name still hung in the air around him and, for once, is genuinely grateful to be on this ridiculous trip. _

* * *

It’s nice.

The room that he’s staying in at the lodge, Haley means. It’s nicer accommodations than hers, though the one floor up should’ve clued her into that knowledge even before she stepped inside. It’s gleaming wood, plush cream seats, a flat screen and an area big enough for classic looking chaise lounges and a coffee table. The door to the en suite is locked, tightly, and the part of her brain still in working hyper vigilant order swiftly catalogues all the entrances and exits to room, and what she could use to defend herself, in a pinch. Carefully, she lays her small purse upon the back of a chaise lounge, closes the door that had been left ajar behind her, and feels eerily close to a lamb stepping into the lion’s den.

(She wondered which one of them will come away first bleeding, whether it was emotionally, or physically.)

There isn’t much spread about the room to bely that it had an occupant, but whatever there was Haley soaked in with an eagerness she lied to herself and called survival. A set of cufflinks on the dresser, a couple empty crystal glasses next to a drink set that had been used. A garment bag hung upon the back of closet doors.

A rattle of ice cubes, and Nathan takes a seat on the edge of the bed, running a hand over his frustratingly perfect hair, those too blue eyes still trained on her. The silence ticks for a moment, two, while she leans against the high arm of the chaise instead of taking an actual seat, and then his deep, accusatory voice breaks it.

“If anyone is due an explanation, it’s me and not you. I’m the one who woke up alone, after all.”

Inwardly, Haley wants to squirm at the accusatory stare, but doesn’t let any of it show outwardly. She just arranges her skirts over her thighs in a show to hide her slipping her hand through the cleverly hidden slit in her skirts to brush fingers against her gun. “You were. But you also happened to ask a girl at one of the vulnerable moments of her life to marry you, so. We can't place all the blame on me."

"Vulnerable?" Nathan swirls the liquor around in the tumbler. "You didn't seem like that to me."

Haley raises her chin. "You took my virginity."

A slight flutter of black butterfly lashes was the only indication that the new knowledge affected him. "I did not know that." Silence, then. "You did say yes."

"I did." Too quick came the answer, even to her ears. "That version of me, did."

"And the one now?"

She wishes his blue eyes didn't burn quite so hot. Haley felt remarkably bored through, almost as if by twin lasers, scorching away the layers she'd built up since being in his presence again.

Nevertheless, she does not answer. If he's as smart as he looks now, years of intelligence on that once young face, Haley is sure that he knows it just as much as her.

(Sometimes, though...she wondered. The proposal had been the most romantic moment of Haley's life and she'd lost track of the amount of times she'd replayed it in her mind, one of her favorite pieces of past time to cling to when the situation she found herself in threatened her sanity. The milky wash of the early moon on their skins, her limbs weak and hopelessly sound around him. Haley had looked at that boy, earnest and satisfied and murmuring from kisses up the line of her sternum that she was the truest thing he'd ever had and felt something grow deep in her heart. Nathan gazed at her, with an unfathomable, unknowable certainty that shook her to bones even now, and asked her to marry him with a conviction far beyond his years.)

And Haley had said yes.


	4. untruths pressed into teeth

"I wanted...I tried, to leave you a message. To call reception and get them to contact you." Haley had, for the record, but those had been plans made before her life changed. Before her wrists had been seized and she was physically incapable of calling anyone but a lawyer she didn't have, terrified at what was going to happen to her.

"But you didn't."

"I didn't." That, at least, was fair for her to admit.

"I hung around for two days. Got a later flight, almost missed my cousin's wedding. No one believed that I'd acquired and lost a wife in the same amount of time it took everyone else to get blackout drunk and slip a few bills in a strippers thong." Even if his jaw hadn't been clenched, the muscle there working near overtime, the flint that shone in his eyes would tell the story for him. Nathan had been hurt. Still was, for ample reason that she felt more and more the longer those eyes bored into her.

(Haley too, ached, though she had forced the loss to grow numb over the years as a wound she'd only inflicted on herself.)

"I'm sorry about that."

He sighs, but it's deceptively light and whooshes into the glass. It's the first sip of his drink that Nathan has taken, and it seems to take an eternity for him to finish it. Restless, talented looking fingers leave fingerprints on the glass. For the sole purpose of keeping track of him, of not losing him again, Haley has the insane urge to somehow abscond with the squares crystal and lift it from the facets herself.

God, she'd been a spy for too long.

"Digging up the past isn't going to make either of us feel any better." Haley leans off the plush, expensive feeling furniture, smoothing her hands down her skirt. She moves closer to the door of the suite than not, somehow feeling more trapped than had ever been,  _ including _ when Haley had escaped, by the skin of teeth, from a Russian prison. Now that was an experience she never wanted to relive. "What happened, happened. We can't go back." Lithe fingers tuck a curl of her dark hair behind her ear, her eyes deep and conflicted.

Clear, pure blue just stares at her, narrowing a bit. "But we can move forward?" The ornate clock, perched atop the cream painted fireplace, ticks loudly in the spaces between their sentences. "To where?"

Inwardly, Haley balks. She hadn't thought this far, of what  _ moving  _ forward might be. Of trying not to dwell on the past that dragged, heavier than a ton, between them, would be like. She hadn't wanted any of this. She was here for a mission. A mission, and a mission  _ only _ .

Not to find her long lost husband.

Not to see the one person who she had terrifiedly knew even in the short time that Haley had known him could've changed everything for her.

Not relive her single greatest regret.

In a quick motion, Nathan downs the rest of his drink, not reacting to her lack of one to her question. He stalks forward, filled with intention so direct and powerful that twin balls of emotion sprout in Haley's stomach, fear and desire. It wasn't that she thought he could hurt her - she knew five ways to get him on the ground and his neck beneath her knee in the breath of time he was taking to get to her - but Haley was afraid of what he held. Of his peculiar gift of being a singular exception to all the walls and protocols she'd had slammed up for years.

Desperately, Haley tries to remember the mission. Tries to remember the sleazy board member, the lives at stake, of her partner who had no idea that to one, unexpectedly important man at the lodge her cover had been blown to high heaven in actual smithereens, and only dimly processes that she's retreating. When the hardy wood of the door, the tiny cold spot of the peephole hitting right between her shoulder blades, processes Haley jolts. And finds herself looking wide eyes at the, now devastatingly HQ, stylishly, carelessly scruffy jaw. The romantic hero slash of the bride of a nose, of that tiny mole right beneath those unforgettable eyes.

(The twenty one year old girl who still lived deep, deep within her wanted to press a kiss to the tiny dark spot on his marbled skin. The twenty eight year old spy murdered the wish immediately.) 

There's an assured thump, fingers spread wide as Nathan leans on the door above her, the infuriatingly beautiful sweep of black butterfly eyelashes wiping her mind absolutely clean. "To  _ where _ ...Haley James Scott."

Something inside her flames high and blinding at the words. No one knew her by that name - no one but him who had made it so, the other other human in the world that knew of her signature on that paper. Of the exchanging of rings she'd left behind and memories that haunted her mind even now, her body a cemetery, robbed of life from the one she'd fallen into and the lack of his hands and presence. 

Haley hated his power over her.

Hated his effortless kryptonite ways, the women he could've been with in the years since she'd locked him down for life and left him just as soon afterwards. Hated that he had only grown handsomer, hated that she hadn't been able to see it, hated that this was supposed to be a mission, one in hundreds, and now she was here. 

Hated that he was the one man Haley would never be able to have. Not for real, not forever. Not like she'd promised him.

That hatred, however deep, wasn't fathomless enough to stop her.

The breath that Haley lost Nathan gained, pulled into his own lungs as they strained toward each other for a kiss almost in unison, no first move, rather one they took together.

( _ He tastes true _ .)

Earthy, molten, talented. Haley didn't know if he'd gotten better, or if a dusty memory she’d clung to for this long simply didn’t compare to the real thing. She finds that she doesn’t care, more than happy to turn her knuckles white on Nathan’s emerald lapel, to throw one arm around his neck and kiss him like this wasn’t horribly inappropriate behavior on her part. Tried to kiss him like this wouldn’t be the last time, though it would, and tried to kiss him like she could stamp the impression and taste of him on her lips for eternity. His hands take up a place on her waist, the shape of them burning through the rigid structure, and strain to hold back. Nathan fails, epically, and his fingers dig in tight enough that Haley scrapes together what brain cells that aren’t drowning in him to concentrate on not letting him see her wince when he presses on an area that only she knows is a purpled bruise the size of a spill of coins.

Nathan is too good.

(Haley is being very bad.)

Consequences fly out of her mind, released from her overactive, top achieving spy level mind by the key of his lips on hers, and for the first time in what feels like forever Haley is completely present in the moment. With him, and in this. He kisses her into the door so hard that the side of her hair pin is pressed uncomfortably in her dark chocolate bun, that the rise and fall of her chest, struggles to gain a sensible rhythm and loses the battle along with his, broad and strong against hers. Haley mimes a biting at his mouth, teeth snapping closed on air, a scant whisper from his lips, and something more akin to a growl than anything else rumbles from under that expensive suit and spills into her mouth with a renewed hunger in his kiss. 

(She couldn’t tell you how long that moment was suspended between them, the falling snow outside and the tiny circle of orange from his bedside lamp. They seem stuck in one place, unable to know how far is allowed and how far is safe, and Haley desperately tries to gather up every part of it for a memory to keep her warm when she eventually had to cool after his heat.)

It isn’t until Nathan’s hands travel slightly downward, probably aiming for her ass, but in reality too close to where the butt of her gun might get caught in his hand, that awareness jolts through her atoms once again. Knowledge of where she is, of her mission, of what she should  _ absolutely not be doing  _ sends a freeze through every vein of hers that Nathan had set aflame and Haley balls her hands up on his chest and pushes him near violently away.

He goes, if with a stumble and after a moment of hesitancy and removability that flits so brief Haley, hours later, will think she dreamed it. Both look as if they have run marathons - her lips kissed thoroughly and raw to the rush of her tongue against it, he with a light stain left on his mouth from her lipstick. Nathan presses the back of his hand to his mouth, and when it comes away the shape of her lips is a sensual ghost on his skin.

“I can’t do this. Not - not right now.” Haley shakes her head, draws her hands hurriedly down her neck to try and calm down her body and the long slumbering things Nathan’s touch had awakened in her. “But maybe…” Her mind works fast, scolding her for the risk she’d taken in its complete shut down at his lips on hers. “We can meet for breakfast.”

A scoff, or something ugly like it, tumbles from that mouth right afterwards. “And will you leave me a note this time? Or are you just going to vanish like last time?” Something in Nathan’s eyes flashes, warring with the arousal that still lingers, a simmering anger Haley at once didn’t know how she felt about. It was as if all that had built between them on that disgustingly innocent looking and now stained with  _ them  _ had to find a place to go after Haley had stopped them, morphing into something Nathan didn’t seem to be happy about revealing but was equally unable to stop.

“Nathan.” 

Everything stops. Pauses a little. Haley had said his name for the first time, odd and hurting on her tongue but still tasty, just like the man who held it. She knows it, and so does he, from the slight change. She can’t say where that change comes from, but she sees it. The words ‘ _ I promise _ ’ tremble somewhere between her throat and her lips, but they won’t come.

They feel wrong, considering that the last time she’d said them Haley clearly hadn’t held up her end of the bargain.

_ To have and to hold, always and forever. _

Not Haley’s first lie. Hadn’t been her last, either, but it had been her worst. 

(It was the only one she’d wanted to be the truth.)

“I’ll leave a note. This time, I will.” Haley darts forward, quicker than could be expected on her spindly heels over the thick carpet, but presses the unsaid words into his mouth instead. She’s gone before he can grasp a hold of her, pulling open the door. The moment develops like a still image in her mind - him, bright eyed and looking almost as if punched in the gut, holding his opposite hand gingerly where a near imperceptible golden glow tried to make itself known under his shirtsleeve, betrayal and a whisper of hope speaking from every one of the many inches he was made up of - and then the door snicks behind her.

She hurries back down the hallway, jabs the elevator button with a finger that Haley will refuse to admit is shaking, and lets out a noise of relief when fortune favors her for once that night and the doors ding open. Feeling almost as if she was holding her breath, the dark haired woman lacks the courage to turn around until the doors are closed, grabbing for the elevator rail and trying to get air back into her lungs. Haley sags a little, feeling as if every nerve she had been so overloaded they’d fizzled out and left her grey. 

Haley presses the little gold section of her bracelet with her fingertip so hard that her skin turns white from the pressure, a small click leaping into existence three too long heartbeats later. There’s something that sounds unpleasantly like rustling sheets, before Clay’s voice sounds in her ear, not a little pissed hiding under a humor born of her never telling him what she was about to. “ _ What, was there a problem with room service? _ ”

Nearly too late, she realizes that she hasn’t pressed the button to her own floor. Haley does so, and then struggles out the words. “My covers have been blown. I need to be extracted. As soon as possible. You’re gonna have to handle this one on your own.”

“ _ Haley, do you need backup? _ ” Clay had switched to serious so fast that it was always a shock to hear it, scary calm and silver plated.

“No. No, I’m okay, but I need to be out of here in an hour. Two tops.”

“ _ Okay. Get packed, I’ll meet you _ .”

“See you soon.” 

He falls silent, but Haley knows that Clay left the link open in case she should need him sooner rather than later. It's that relief, of her partner at work having her back unconditionally, that she uses to keep her legs moving and her back ramrod straight. 

  
As she packs and the  _ always  _ sears into her spine, a living tattoo frustrated and alone, Haley tries desperately to convince herself that she’s doing the right thing.


End file.
